WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well we really are winding down as we get closer to Xmas and the serious news becomes drowned out with the bleating of retailers practicing wailing about the demise of the high street/shopping mall/corner shop at the hands of the rapacious Internet entrepreneur. I find it difficult to sympathise. Out of town shops having eaten the small businesses in the towns are now discovering what it's like to be the prey rather than the predator.
As most of you know one of the things I do for a living is to write computer programs. With that in mind I'd like to like to nominate the programmer who programmed the payment form for British Gas's online payment system as the dork of the year. Take a look at this: http://www.ibgames.net/alan/society/britishgas.html. Imagine trying to use a credit card that expired 106 years ago!
The start date has the same problem. What an earth was the programmer thinking? Credit cards in 1900? I don't think they even had plastic then! I can just imagine an aristocrat handing over his polished oak credit card to pay for 42 cases of crusted port, and then waving over one of his flunkies to enter the PIN.
"Gad Sir, what is the world coming to!"
Shorts:
You know, I almost feel sorry for Sony. Hot on the heels of the exploding battery disaster and the lack of adequate numbers of PS3s comes another product recall. This time it's Sony digital cameras. It seems that the glue used to stick the cameras sensors to the backing is affecting the sensors, giving blurred or non-existent images. Quite a problem for a camera!
The irony is that Sony engineers spotted this problem some time ago and thought they'd fixed it. Unfortunately, they misdiagnosed the problem and fixed the wrong thing - they thought it was a reaction between the glue and the plastic packing, so they changed to a ceramic backing. Now they've discovered the problem is caused by iodine in the glue.
Of course, they've now switched to an iodine free glue, which will, hopefully, fix the problem, but in the meantime they've had to recall a large number of still and camcorder digital cameras. Just what they needed at Xmas time :(
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e18g0FypUC0FrK0EuJh0Ev
Interesting news on the patent front in the US - the Supreme Court is finally getting round to taking a look at the problems with so-called 'trivial' patents. These are patents which have been granted for 'inventions' which are just obvious or trivial combinations of previous patents.
Currently, in order to challenge such a patent you have to demonstrate that there was a 'teaching, suggestion, or motivation' to combine existing tech in the patent under challenge. You can imagine how much scope language like this leaves for lawyer to dissemble for hours on end. (Kerrr-ching, American Express - that'll do nicely...)
As Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia put it, "It's misleading to say that the whole world is embraced within these three nouns. This is gobbledygook. It really is, it's irrational..."
So will this dubious method of extending patent protection be zapped?
Difficult to say. The problem is that it's a favourite tactic of the big pharmaceutical companies. As their patents start to run out, and the threat of generic versions of the drug undermining their exorbitant profits is raised, they have the habit of combining the threatened drug with another obvious one and patenting the resulting combination.
It really is going to be interesting to see what the Supreme Court finally comes up with.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/29/supremes_make_sense_of_patents/
And while we are on the subject of patents, I note that Microsoft have lost an important patent case in Korea. The Korean Supreme Court ruled in favour of a patent held by two Korean academics over technology for automatically switching between English and Korean.
The academics, who reckon that Microsoft lifted their technology, are claiming US75 million and the withdrawal of the offending versions of Office. Microsoft are challenging the patent, but that will take time, and this ruling will undoubtedly damage their sales in that country.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/27/ms_korea_court/
Moving over to the question of copyright we find that something interesting is happening in the UK. Last year the government set up an independent review of intellectual 'property' under the chairmanship of Andrew Gowers, former editor of the Financial Times. The review is due out shortly, but leaked copies indicate that it is recommending that there is no case for the extension of copyright beyond the current 50 years on sound recordings.
The recording industry had been lobbying for an extension to 95 years, something that is, from their point of view, urgent, because all those hits from the late fifties and the sixties will soon becoming out of copyright. The companies have already succeeded in extending copyright in the USA, but it now looks like there is a good chance that it will soon be legal to reproduce early Elvis hits over here, but not in the USA. An interesting state of affairs!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/27/copyright_not_extended/
In January new EU regulations will make hardware manufacturers and retailers responsible for providing environmentally friendly disposal and recycling facilities for all products sold.
This attempt at forcing companies to recycle their own mess reminds me of the ill-judged legislation about disposing of fridges we had here a few years ago. The intent then, as now, was good, but the consequences hadn't been thought through and the law went into force before there were any facilities for extracting the CFCs used for coolant in the older models.
The result was that it became impossible to legally get rid of an old fridge - they had to be taken to special recycling centres, and there weren't any in the country. Inevitably, the countryside filled up with illegally dumped rusting fridges as householders paid dodgy companies cash to 'dispose' of the unwanted fridges.
In this case all that will happen is that the manufacturers will pay some third party 'recycling' company to get rid of junked electronic devices, and heaven alone knows where the one million tons of unwanted toxic components discarded in the UK each year will go. In the mean time there is no incentive to cut out the toxics at a manufacturing level.
The problem is that the green movement is enamoured of 'recycling', when the real problem is finding non-destructive and non-dangerous ways of producing consumer goods. My solution? Levy taxes on the hazardous components at the point of sale, import or manufacture. Given the cut throat nature of the PC industry I bet there would be a very rapid replacement of toxic components with more acceptable substitutes.
http://Mail.computing.co.uk/cgi-bin1/DM/y/ey2r0BsjfA0WXC0DZOr0Eh
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/11/28/pc_makers_green_laws/
I spotted an interesting snippet in the PhysOrg.com mailing list this week. It seems that there is a rare form of ice called ice XI (ice eleven) which is ferroelectric - which means the substance acts like iron in that passing an electric current through it turns it into a magnet. It only forms under certain conditions of high pressure and low temperature. Not only that, it takes about 10,000 years under these conditions for 'normal' ice to turn into ice XI. Needless to say this is a long time to wait for your laboratory experiment to finish, making it difficult to prove that the stuff actually exists!
Now, however, an international team of scientists have figured out a way to speed things up by adding impurities to the ice, and succeeded in creating the stuff after a mere few hundred hours, thus proving that it actually exists!
OK, OK, I know this has nothing to do with computers and the Internet, but I've always been fascinated by the idea of alternate forms of ice ever since I read Kurt Vonnegut's book, "Cat's Cradle", with its description of the legendary Ice-Nine. A highly recommended read, by the way...
http://www.physorg.com/news83862687.html
Finally, there was good news for the Open Source movement this week, with the announcement that the French parliament has decided to forsake Windows for Open Office and Linux. In June 2007 French deputies' offices will switch to Linux workstations - 1,154 of them. The French government already uses Linux extensively, but that is mostly on servers. This represents a major switch to Linux on the desk top.
Nice one guys, just try not to screw it up, please.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6138372.html?tag=nl.e550
Scanner: Other stories
Businesses reject quicker, weaker patents
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/28/patents_report/
Novell/Microsoft - Open Source spin-meisters react
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=710025&l=15680&ctl=
151142B:215D3E184FC552DCCDC47CE72D491CA0EFF29049075316B4
Carbon adjusted supply chain
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=708397&l=3993&ctl=
150D074:215D3E184FC552DC8BFC1702C3BA2B93EFF29049075316B4
Relational database goes embedded
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e18g0FypUC0FrK0EuJm0E1
Zune means zilch for artists
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/29/steve_gordon_zune_royalties/
Costs go sky high at the UK Ministry of Defence
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/27/mod_costs_over_budget/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barbara, David and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
3 December 2006
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html
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